Aaron's Update

Goals:

A. Celebrate church festival with our neighboring village, especially for Olivia to participate all her friends in the village youth group.

B. Conduct comprehension level checking on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7.

Like each of our village trips since returning to Solomon Islands May 2019, this one was a bit of an adventure. Shipping has been worse this term than we have ever had before. Once we identified a vessel going our direction, we endured back to back delays. Thankfully though, we were able to leave Honiara for the Russells just in time to make the targeted celebrations.

On arrival, we jumped right in to village business. In Lavukal culture, going around to say hello to everyone is very appropriate on arrival. Olivia immediately made connections to see about how the youth was planning participate that evening at the church celebration. I, on the other hand, went to say “hello” to our village chief, only to get involved in a multi-hour conversation about many, many things. 

The church celebration went off well. Olivia and her group participated in a drama and some singing in the evening programs. Later in the following week, Olivia enjoyed many practices with the group as they prepared for another festival at a village in a neighboring district for the following week.

On the translation side, I used some of my anthropology knowledge to better work out plans for his village checking. One of the topics with the chief was checking an idea of working the checking sessions around the normal rhythm of village life, especially for the women. So far in the project, the women have not been as engaged. I wanted to target participation by the ladies this time, and worked the program to fit well with their schedules. The reviewers met in the morning, then took an afternoon break for personal work (like going to the garden), and resumed in the evenings around nine. The experiment seemed to be a success. In all, the checking went well and my confidence in the translated text grew a little.

After a bumpy crossing to get back to the island of Guadalcanal, the family rejoiced to all be together again. Two main goals met. Thank God for a successful trip!